


the ocean washed open your grave

by s0dafucker



Category: Re-Animator (Movies)
Genre: Gunshot Wounds, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Needles, POV Second Person, Trans Male Character, canon-typical needles ig, canon-typical not-death, homoerotic cpr, i didnt know that was a tag, post-reani but pre-events of bride, that sweet t4t love baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:22:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22428544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/s0dafucker/pseuds/s0dafucker
Summary: you dream of herbert injecting reagent, and hormones, though of course you’ve seen him do neither; you dream of him kissing you, and he’s never done that.(there have been some hasty, aborted attempts at cpr- when you were not-dead and he was almost-dead and you were both clinging to medicine in situations that called for miracles. kiss of life, even though it’s nothing like kissing. you thought it would be, once. when you were young.)you had a real nice face. i had an early death.
Relationships: Daniel Cain/Herbert West
Comments: 11
Kudos: 38





	the ocean washed open your grave

that sea between your brain and your skull is boiling over, tap it like a maple tree and scald yourself, tap it like a maple tree at the base of your spine, drink it down like a too-hot cup of coffee, lie back in bed like an mri, like an autopsy, like you’re dying, like you’ve been dead-

you were always good at cpr and so when herbert readies his hands for compressions you know what’s coming and you sit up, fast, too fast for your head and your chest and the swollen feeling that’s persisting everywhere, infected and wrong. 

(he’s not strong enough for cpr. or maybe you’re too strong. you cracked a sternum, back in college.)

his eyes are wild, his fingers on your stuttering pulse, and you’re stupid and dead but you wish his hand would linger. you’re stupid. ‘herbert,’ you say, and it’s half a whisper and you have a fever, probably, with the way your head pounds, and he sounds pissed off but you can’t make out the words. 

-

he’s making notes at your bedside and maybe in another life it would be sweet but you’re not sure which side of the scientist/specimen line you fall on, now. (you’re dead.)

(he keeps telling you that you’re dead. he thinks it’s funny, probably. you think it’s a little funny, too, but you wish he’d shut his trap about it for a second.)

(you were scared to get flu shots, when you were a kid. you tell him, when he’s tying up a tourniquet like you’re shooting heroin, and he smiles and it’s all tight at the edges, like he’s focusing or like he’s trying not to cry. you think it’s funny.)

‘dan,’ he says, and you blink until you can see and his hand is on your sweaty forehead, shoving your hair out of your eyes, and if he presses his lips to your skin- it’s the most effective way to take your temperature. ‘you’re doing well.’

-

you dream of peru, mostly. herbert in your dreams shifts closer to you in the wee hours of the morning, his brow furrowed even as he sleeps; he wraps an arm around your shoulders and stinks of death and sweat; the herbert when you wake touches your wrist, the crease of your elbow, and you imagine him reaching in for your veins. 

‘do you remember when you got shot?’

you’re both surprised that your voice works- it’s rough and rasping but herbert lifts his head from his notes and smiles wryly.

it isn’t a nightmare, the night herbert was shot, because you stitched up his wound and it was hot and wet under your hands like sex, hot and wet and alive. he was small, in your hands, and he was delicate, and he was swearing, sweating with his glasses down the bridge of his nose, and your fingers were touching his skin and the bullet and your gloves were melting like tissue paper, in the dream or the memory or both. he was sweating, with his hair plastered down, and you realized when you stripped him that you had something in common and no way to tell him, with his eyes like molten metal boring into yours, with his eyes like bullets,  _ get it out,  _ his voice brisk as anything, his eyes like bullets.  _ let’s go home,  _ he had said, and maybe he meant arkham or maybe he just meant before. you did. 

you stared at his scars under his shirt and you made him a new one with your hands wet and shaking, your hands wet like sex and like violence, his eyes like bullets. how long had it been since you’d seen him in a clean shirt?  _ get it out,  _ he’d said. cleanse and purify, remove it like a tumor. he was alive. you were alive. 

-

‘do you have a cigarette?’ you ask, and he, blessedly, produces a pack from his coat pocket.

you got hooked on the things in peru. he passes you a lighter, because he did too. 

there’s a fresh ache in the muscle of your thigh- you glance down and he marks something in his notes and says, quietly, ‘i hope you don’t mind. i wouldn’t have wanted anyone to skip it, if it were me.’

you stare at the band-aid. somehow imagining him doing your testosterone is more terrifying and intimate than the reagent. you exhale and murmur, ‘thank you.’ 

-

you dream of peru. you dream of smoking. you dream of the morning after your surgery, when you had pressed your hands to your chest and sobbed in hazy relief. you dream of herbert injecting reagent, and hormones, though of course you’ve seen him do neither; you dream of him kissing you, and he’s never done that.

(there have been some hasty, aborted attempts at cpr- when you were not-dead and he was almost-dead and you were both clinging to medicine in situations that called for miracles. kiss of life, even though it’s nothing like kissing. you thought it would be, once. when you were young.)

( _ when you were young,  _ you mock back to herbert, when he’s acting as though he isn’t young now, as if he’s seen lifetimes, but you feel so very old and so you understand.  _ when i was young and foolish,  _ he says, some lifetime ago, and you scoff but now you see yourself as you were a year ago and you think that you were only a child.)

( _ when you were alive,  _ one of you says, and it’s true enough.)

-

‘you’re dead,’ herbert says, clipped and neat, and you don’t cry. he wipes your cheek with his hand, bare of gloves, always without gloves when he’s home, always without gloves when he’s reaching into cadavers and dissecting roadkill. always without gloves when he’s swiping at the wetness under your eye, at your blurry vision. his eyes behind his glasses- when he woke from his surgery, did he fumble for them? did his clumsy hands ask first for sight? 

he could’ve done it himself. that’s something he would do. you’re dead, dan. do you feel alright? you died. i can’t promise you won’t stay dead. i can’t promise you that, you know i can’t. dan? you’re dead. maybe it’s not you crying, after all.

-

he’s helping you sit up and you can’t see well and you aren’t restrained, though your muscles strain like perhaps you were, or you should be. he’s holding a straight razor and it looks like a scalpel in his hand. 

his eyes like bullets. take a deep breath. don’t flinch, when he comes toward you, or he’ll slip and he’ll slit your throat and kill you all over again. there’s a strange look in his eye, like he’s been crying or he’s about to or he’s been shot. his glasses are too far down his nose. when you push them back up he stares, open-mouthed, and the way his tongue draws over his lips makes you sick. 

‘did you do it yourself?’ the first glide of the razor is gentler than you’d expected. ‘your-’  _ mastectomy  _ is an ugly word, a woman’s word- ‘your surgery. for your chest.’

you’ve surprised him, too; his eyebrows twitch, the barest movement. ‘no.’ he holds your chin in his hand. his grip is firm. solid. 

‘i thought you might’ve.’ (is that your voice, that rough whisper? a joke about  _ two packs a day  _ springs to mind, unbidden.) 

‘doctor gruber knew a man.’ he’s so close. are you sick, or is it something else. are you sick, or does the set of his mouth make your stomach turn with something else. are you sick. 

he turns your head, with his sure hands, and you shiver from the close pass of the razor or the weight of his gaze like bullets.

he looks like he's examining, with that old focused glint in his eyes. scrutinizing. is he vivisecting? does this count as surgery? 

'what about you?'

he turns your head to shave your jaw, the pads of his fingers warm on your chin. 

'a friend did it, my first year at miskatonic. it was his second surgery ever.' you smile, remembering, and his hand with the razor stills. 'i got it for free if i signed the waiver.'

your scars are ugly because of it. herbert's thumb ghosts over your lip and it sparks. 

-

you watch the needle, and you wonder if it’s more perverse to pretend it’s morphine or heroin. it hurts-  _ birth is always painful _ , says another herbert in another house and another lifetime- burns, in your veins like fire. his hands are gentle. reverent. is it more perverse to pretend he is making love to you, or that he’s removing a bullet. are they so different. 

his fingers are soft and his face is angular, as he watches your veins and you watch him. 

-

you’re strong enough to touch him and too weak not to, and so you leave a fingerprint on his glasses trying to push them up his nose, so you fix his hair when he looks like he hasn’t slept, so you hold his tie in your loose grasp and ask about his findings. 

he looks away. 'herbert.' 

'i'm not- i'm not sure of anything.'

'i'm alive, aren't i?' 

in a manner of speaking. alive enough. 

he looks at you, with his eyes cutting right through you, right to your heart. eyes like bullets. 

'yes, you are.'

-

herbert helps you shower, when you realize that the smell of sweat and rot is coming from you. he's been politely ignoring it, which is unlike him- or perhaps he's always been this considerate, and you were the rude one. you have too much time to think about him, now. 

herbert helps you shower, and he helps you undress. 

(your fingers are too clumsy, the frail, painful wrists of an arthritic.)

you watch his eyelashes, from above, the twitch in his brow as he focuses on your buttons. his hands are warm. you wouldn't let a genetic man do this, would you. his hands are warm- you can feel his knuckles through your undershirt. you wouldn't let any other man do this. he helps you, and you let him. 

(he gets in with you. you can only sit, and so your back is against the water. it's warm. you were afraid you wouldn't be warm again. he sits across from you, in his undershirt, and you’re warm.)

there’s steam on his glasses. you’re in your boxers. your shoulders ache, but it’s the familiar sting of unused muscles, and you’re grateful to feel something in your body that isn’t entirely foreign. you sit, cross-legged like kindergarten, across from each other like therapy, naked/clothed like an autopsy. you drag one finger across the condensation on his glasses, and he takes them off. his eyes are dark and you stare, you let the water hit your bare back and you stare. you’re dead. you’re watching him and he’s letting you.

‘herbert,’ you say, and you aren’t sure why. to make him look at you, maybe. just to hear it in your voice. you wonder if there’s any significance to the name. what made him choose it. (your parents said they would’ve named you dan if you’d been genetic; and thus.)

he clasps his hands in his lap and you aren’t sure what you want to say, but he asks, halting, ‘could i wash your hair?’

you should ask him to cut it, too, while he’s up there- you nearly did in peru, when it was hot and you were always working, always damp with sweat and needing to see, but he said, once, that it suited you, and whether it was the words that charmed you or the strange look in his eyes you left it alone. 

you nearly forgot how it feels to be touched. some old masculine bravado rears its ugly head at the thought, at your sudden lack of tension under herbert’s gentle hands, but it ebbs. you long to feel another person’s body against your own and it is his, now, sitting on the lip of the tub with his legs wide for you to slot neatly between. you can’t see his eyes and it’s better that way. 

‘how do you feel?’ he asks, and it’s research but it could be something else. you close your eyes and imagine it’s something else.

‘tired.’ a sigh heaves through you- breathing is an event now, in a way it never used to be. breathing hurts like over-exertion, like living, like too much. ‘i’m so goddamn tired.’

he laughs, the little amused huff that’s reserved, as far as you can tell, for you. his fingers card through your hair, down the back of your neck. goosebumps spread down your spine. 

‘everything aches.’ his hands are wet and soft and he kneads into your shoulders, your muscles like marble. you don’t like to think of your body, now or ever, and you don’t want to imagine your flesh below your skin, what he’s had to do to you. what you’ve both done. 

his thumbs press into your neck, on either side of your spine, and it hurts but it’s grounding. he hurts but he’s grounding you, with his eyes like bullets, with his hands on your body. 

he doesn’t say  _ it’ll be okay  _ because he won’t lie to you, he doesn’t say  _ i’ll save you  _ because you wouldn’t want to hear it, he doesn’t say  _ i love you too  _ because you won’t. 

‘i’m sorry,’ he says instead, barely audible, and you pretend you haven’t heard. because he wouldn’t know what to do with your forgiveness. where to put it down. you tip your head back into his hands and you trust him. again and again and again, you trust him.

-

you wake from a nightmare, and herbert startles in his chair. 

(it was about being buried, which is to be expected, probably, about suffocating in the dirt and hearing your own choked sobs-)

(about a tombstone with a name that isn’t yours on it, because no matter how many times you look at your ID and sign your name the thought of your tombstone makes you feel cold-)

and herbert is awake, dazed, hurrying to brush your hair back from your forehead and wrap an arm around your shoulders. he’s so tactile, always has been, always touching and grounding and holding you steady. shock blankets. the fevered look in his eye over a lab table, the firm grasp on your lapels. he holds you and lets you breathe and doesn’t ask. he’s wearing a sweater that you think is yours, but it smells like him, and you shut your eyes and you hold him tight. 

he does your t shot, later, when he’s forced some water into you, and it  _ is  _ your sweater, blue and worn and hanging off him in a way that makes you want to cry. his hair’s hanging in his face; as short as he cuts it, it always finds a way. you fix it, push his glasses up his nose. he lights your cigarette. 

‘herbert,’ you say, between exhaling and ashing the thing into your water glass; ‘you ever thought about putting a bullet in my head and being done with it?’

he fixes you with a sharp look, sets the needle aside. ‘of course not.’

he always buys the good smokes, menthols that feel smoother and taste better than the roll-ups in the barracks, things with filters to wrinkle between your trembling fingers. ‘i’m killing myself again anyway,’ you joke, gesturing with it. 

‘your heart won’t fail for another ten years, at least. and lung cancer doesn’t run in your family.’

‘you think that highly of my heart?’ (the family history- you’ll let it slide. it doesn’t quite surprise you.)

he colors, two spots of pink high on his cheekbones. you don’t know when you started noticing the elegance of his bone structure. 

‘it’s rather strong.’

something in your stomach flips, looking at him, and so you focus on your cigarette. 

‘is that my sweater?’

he flushes. you smoke down to the filter. 

‘you’ll burn your hand,’ he mutters, and snatches the butt from your hand, puts it out in your glass.

‘and then i won’t be fresh enough,’ you say, and it’s half a sigh. you lean back and stare at the old popcorn ceiling. 

‘you aren’t a specimen.’ when did his voice become so quiet? the herbert you met could yell like he’d never tire of it. 

_ what am i, then,  _ you don’t ask, because you’re thinking of your own shaky hands fumbling with meg and the reagent and you’re trying not to think the things you do, with him so close and so quiet. you touch him, instead of talking. you’re a coward like that, a man like that, reaching out for his shoulder and neck and the line of his jaw. 

‘it is yours,’ he says. ‘i missed you. in the lab.’

you try to lean forward and your muscles protest and he, nervous, reaches out to brace you; and it’s close enough, it’s enough to hold the side of his face and relish in how warm he is, how his eyes glow behind his glasses like something at the side of the road. like lightning. like bullets. 

‘herbert,’ you say, and he looks at your mouth. 

you kiss him, and he’s soft under your tongue, and he reaches into your hair, and you feel alive, finally, you feel alive and you hold him, you feel his pulse jump under his skin, and he kisses you. 

(he runs his tongue over his lips, as you look at him in wonder or awe or love, maybe it’s love- his brow furrows and his tongue swipes over his pink lips, contemplative; ‘tastes like ash,’ he says, and you say, ‘shut up,’ without thinking, and he laughs. he pulls you in with his hands in your hair.)

-

you dig out an old vhs of rocky horror. the humor isn’t lost on him.

he’s stealing your talking heads shirt, and half the couch, and he relinquishes his leg to your lap sometime amidst  _ sweet transvestite  _ for his t shot, and you think it’s funny. (you don’t miss the wild gleam in his eye. maybe you’re giving him ideas, or he’s just gay. or both.)

you’re dead, and you’re not-dead, and you’re kissing him during your favorite shitty movie and he’s complaining about the plot and not-complaining about the rest of it and you’re in love with him. 

**Author's Note:**

> honestly i think we should bring back genetic as a word for cis
> 
> sometimes i forget that herbert isnt explicitly trans in the reani movies and i read smthn where hes cis and im like oh ?? weird au but ok


End file.
